c. 2006 Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly

(UNDATED) This year marks the sixth Veterans Day since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and the fourth since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Churches around the country will join national observances with the usual services and music to salute the armed forces and to recognize the sacrifices of those who bear the burden of America’s wars.

But at some churches, a quieter and much less visible acknowledgment of that military sacrifice has been going on for years now, week after week, praying aloud at Sunday morning worship services the names of every soldier who has died in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Rev. James L. Burns, rector of the Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest in New York City, said including the individual names of the war dead in the church’s weekly prayers for the departed has been met with gratitude by all members of his congregation, whatever their political persuasion.

“Every generation gets its war,” said Burns, a Navy veteran, the son of a World War II veteran, and the grandson of a veteran of the Spanish-American War. “We are a species that seems incapable of living without war. War costs dearly, and we should stop and remember.”

Many churches pray more generally for all members of the military and those “in harm’s way,” but naming the dead one by one, said the Rev. Morris K. Thompson, dean of Christ Church (Episcopal) Cathedral in Lexington, Ky., powerfully reminds people what their country has asked the armed services to do.

“Wars are started by the president and the Congress, not by the military,” said Thompson, a Marine veteran. “They have just followed orders, and we remember them simply because of that _ they are following an order.”

One or two of his members complained that reading the names in the prayers somehow makes a politically charged statement, but Thompson said such prayer is not about politics. “It is a reminder of what we are doing. On behalf of every one of us, America has asked them to go to war. Agree with the war or not, we have asked them to go and fight a battle. The prayers are to remember their duty and sacrifice, and remembrance is an important type of theological reflection.”

Some weeks, Thompson said, when 30 or 40 names have been read, the effect has been especially profound.

“It gets very quiet, and it does sink in, one name after another after another,” he said. By reading each name deliberately and intentionally, “we are giving to God what is God’s, giving these people back to God, that they will continue to know God even in death.”

In Washington, D.C., at St. James Episcopal Church on Capitol Hill, in addition to its weekly prayers naming the military dead in Iraq and Afghanistan, all of the nearly 3,000 names of the military killed in the two current wars in the Middle East were read at a special evening prayer service on Nov. 2, All Souls Day. The prayers took almost an hour, according to the Rev. Richard E. Downing, who said their significance is all-embracing.

“It is like what the poet John Donne said about for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for you. We are all a part of everybody else.”

Peter Washington, who has edited an anthology of prayers for Everyman’s Library, has underscored the immediacy with which such communal prayers enable people to confront death in times of war.

“Prayer can help to remind us of our solidarity with other creatures, be they allies or enemies,” he said in a 2003 online interview with the PBS program Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly. “Communal prayer reinforces the sense of group solidarity while tempering the feeling of bravado. It brings home our mutual responsibilities to one another, to the enterprise on which we are engaged. Ideally, it should remind us of both the merits and the dangers of that enterprise.”

At Enon Chapel Baptist Church outside Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, N.C., the Rev. Jim Kelley said “the tempo of deployment seems like it is almost a revolving door,” and he has noticed recently that “people just numb themselves to the bad news” of war. “It is a survival instinct,” he said.

Still, the congregation prays by name for those marines and sailors known to them who have been deployed, wounded or killed, and for Veterans Day there will be services to remember not just the dead but also the living, who served and sacrificed across many years and many wars.

“We owe them our continued prayers, particularly aging veterans,” Kelley said. “As a nation, we owe them our partnership in their old age.”

KRE/JL END DANIEL

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